During manufacture of pneumatic tires, it is required to supply filler-fitted bead cores each constructed of unvulcanized rubber with a bundle of bead wires wrapped therein and a rubber filler fitted to the outer peripheral surface of the bead core. Such filler-fitted bead cores being subject to deformation, difficulties have been encountered in fitting the bead cores on a tire building machine by the use of automated mechanical means. For this reason, filler-fitted bead cores have thus far been installed on a tire building machine solely by human efforts.
While bead cores are being handled manually, the fillers fitted to the bead cores tend to stick to one another. If a filler thus caused to stick another one is forced to separate forcibly therefrom, the filler may be caused to deform irregularly and may lose its initial configuration. Meticulous care must therefore be exercised in manually handling filler-fitted bead cores, imposing mental and physical burdens on operators to fit filler-fitted bead cores on a tire building machine. Manual handling of bead cores has further been a bar to drastically improving the production efficiency of tires. The present invention aims at resolution of these problems encountered in a prior-art method of supplying filler-fitted bead cores to a tire building machine.